Dr. Dori Laub, 81, died at Yale New Haven Hospital on Saturday, June 23, 2018. Dr. Laub arrived at Yale as a fourth year resident in 1969 and became a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry in a career of almost 50 years.
Dr. Laub received his medical training at the Hadassah Medical School at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and his M.A. in Clinical Psychology at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. In 1966, he emigrated to the United States where he trained as a second year resident at Boston City Hospital followed by two years as a Fellow at the Austen Riggs Center, Stockbridge, Massachusetts. In 1979, he completed his psychoanalytic training at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis.
In the Yale Department of Psychiatry, Dr. Laub worked at the Connecticut Mental Health Center. At the Yale University MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, he was Acting Director of the Genocide Studies Program from 2000 to 2003 and Deputy Director of Trauma Studies beginning in 2001.
Dr. Laub was born in Cernauti, Romania on June 8, 1937. As a result of the Romanian alliance with Germany and persecution of Jews, in 1942 he and his parents were deported to a camp, Cariera de Piatra and later Obodovka, a prison village, in Transnistria, Romanian-occupied Ukraine. His father disappeared during a German raid prior to liberation by the Soviets. Following the liberation, he and his mother were reunited with his grandparents who had survived in Cernauti. He emigrated to Israel in 1950.
As a young adult, Dr. Laub did not regard his early experiences as significant; but during his analysis, when he characterized a conversation in the camp with a young girl about whether they could eat grass as a pastoral scene occurring in a meadow, his analyst remarked that after the war women prisoners from a camp had sworn they had been served breakfast in bed by German guards and that this was an example of denial. Thus began Dr. Laub’s interest in the denial and recovery of traumatic memories.
In 1973, Dr. Laub volunteered as a psychiatrist during the Yom Kippur War. Many of the most severe psychiatric casualties were children of Holocaust Survivors. Realizing the power of unremembered and unmetabolized experience to cripple lives across generations, he dedicated himself to the study of Holocaust survivors.
Building on a tradition of pioneering psychoanalytic investigations of trauma by Abram Kardiner, William Niederland and Henry Krystal, Dr. Laub made his own significant contributions through his scholarship, research and preservation/documentation work. Dr. Laub is the author of over 30 articles and numerous book chapters on the knowing and representation of trauma, nine co-authored with Nanette Auerhahn, PhD. He is the co-author with Shoshana Felman, Ph.D., of Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. His writing deepened and extended previous ways of understanding trauma as well as expanded techniques for helping trauma survivors. He has been a guiding figure in the field of massive psychic trauma studies.
Having been approached by Laurel Vlock, a television producer, to provide an interview about his Holocaust experiences, Dr. Laub agreed on the condition that other testimonies be recorded. He and Ms. Vlock were quickly inundated by survivors wanting to speak. They raised money, organized a procedure for taking testimonies and co-founded the Fortunoff Yale Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. There are now over 4,500 testimonies recorded at Yale and affiliated projects in Europe, North and South America, and Israel. The Archive has made possible numerous award-winning educational materials, books, and documentaries about the Holocaust and events such as the Cambodian genocide, the internment of Japanese- Americans during World War II, and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia.
In a related project, Dr. Laub recorded testimonies of psychiatrically hospitalized Holocaust survivors in Israel. There was strong resistance to this study based on predictions that the patients would not speak and would grow disorganized. Dr. Laub found that the patient’s Holocaust experiences had been overlooked in their treatments, that the patients wanted to speak even when it was difficult for them to do so and that it did not lead to increased disorganization.
Dr. Laub’s clinical experience included many years of work at the Connecticut Valley Hospital in Middletown, CT. In his private practice, he worked primarily with victims of massive trauma as well as their children.
Dr. Laub is an Honoree of Yad Vashem-Jerusalem. He worked with many international collaborators and lectured around the world about trauma.
Dr. Laub was the devoted husband of the late Johanna Bodenstab and beloved father of Miri Goldman and Avi Laub. He has five grandchildren: Joshua, Rachel and Rebecca Goldman and Charlotte and Ethan Laub. Contributions may be sent to the Fortunoff Yale Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library, PO Box 208240, New Haven, CT 06520-8240.